News.YC isn't trying to compete with Digg and Reddit. Really; the last thing I need is to have to manage servers with that kind of traffic. The goal here is just to be the watercooler of the startup world. That is a quite small world, tens of thousands at most. I'd much rather this site had really good comments than huge volumes of traffic.
news.yc takes the bulk of my web browsing (hard to believe, right?) and reddit is still great for non-startup buzz. I'll peek at digg every so often but the quality of top submissions seem to keep dropping.<p>The reviewer at CenterNetworks is right on with his observation on the quality of referral traffic. The users of news.yc are less prone to be the visit-quickscroll-exit types that inhabit a lot of social news sites.